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Vancouver he met his current girlfriend, 29-year-old former Miss Vancouver, Sabrina Dhowre. And to cap off a great 2017, he stars alongside Jessica Chastain in the thriller Molly’s
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Awakens (’15). Empire set the bar for other Star Wars movies. So it goes without saying, everything else falls short. However, The Last Jedi strives to be as dark as Empire, and in many respects, it achieves that end. Baddie Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), is determined to fill Darth Vader’s shoes, er… make that helmet, and doesn’t care who gets in his way for galactic conquest. Needless to say, a lot of victims meet the business end of Kylo Ren’s light saber, Jedi’s, Siths, Storm Troopers – he makes no distinction. He’s a bad mutha clucka,’ but he’s also conflicted, which is his weakness – a problem that Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) senses. Last Jedi picks up where Awakens leaves off, with Rey (Daisy Ridley) finding Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) on a planet deep in the regions of space. You might recall cheering toward the end of Awakens, as Rey hands Luke a lightsaber. The anticipation during the past two years is, Luke will pick up the lightsaber and once again lead the fight against the forces of evil. But whoa! Hold your phasers…I mean blasters. It is not to be. Taking a page out of A New Hope (’77), Luke is now an old man who wants to live out his days in self-imposed exile. He wants nothing to do with lightsabers, Jedi’s or the Dark Side. Like a young Luke Skywalker, Rey wants the reluctant Luke to train her in the ways of the Jedi, so they both can join the resistance and fight the New Order. But, ah, there’s the rub. At the same time Rey is trying desperately to recruit Luke, Kylo Ren is using the Dark Side to seduce her to the New Order. Director Rian Johnson does a terrific job directing the traffic through Jedi’s three storylines that seamlessly come together during the film’s third act. There are twist and turns that the casual Star Wars fan might not see coming. At least I didn’t. It is a nice surprise that the late Carrie Fisher received a lot of screen time, as Director Johnson must have shot a lot of footage, or completed pri-
mary filming before her untimely death. To the film’s credit, and to the anticipation of fans, The Last Jedi checks all the boxes from Imperial Walkers to Star Destroyers. Chewy is back, ex-storm trooper Finn (John Boyega) and his new found love interest, mechanic Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) visit a Star Wars bar punctuated with a host of interesting extraterrestrials, and of course each planet has cute and cuddly creatures. But unlike Return of the Jedi (‘83), thankfully we don’t get an overdose on those damn Muppets. The Last Jedi also has the distinction of being the longest running Star Wars movie with 152 minutes. So you might want to hit the potty before the film starts. In the end, The Last Jedi is a pretty good movie that could have been edited by 30 minutes for the sake of time and plot development. But it’s a good movie nonetheless. A word of caution: Marvel films have us programed to wait for an after credit scenes in these blockbuster films. Since this is a Disney film, don’t bother.
IDRIS ELBA:
Molly’s Game is About Gender Balance and Power By Samantha Ofole-Prince Photo credit Michael Gibson
By all accounts, Idris Elba has had
an incredibly good year. First, he played the heroic Roland Deschain in Nikolaj Arcel’s The Dark Tower and reprised his role of Heimdall in Thor: Ragnarok. Then, the actor took on his first lead romantic role in Hany AbuAssad’s The Mountain Between Us, starring opposite Kate Winslet, and it’s during filming of the movie in
Game. “It has been a rather good year,” agrees the Golden Globe award-winning actor who since his breakout role as Stringer Bell, the lieutenant of a Baltimore drug empire on the HBO series “The Wire,” has appeared in well over 40 films and television projects. There has also been directing stints with just four years ago, Elba made his directorial debut with his own teleplay, The Pavement Psychologist and he also created, directed and starred in the music video Lover of Light by Mumford and Sons, which has received more than nine million YouTube views. Adding, his company, Green Door Pictures, is developing a comedy titled In The Long Run, which set in 1985 London and is about a West African family he says is loosely based on his childhood. But despite starring in some major films from Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, Star Trek Beyond, to Cary Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation, which earned him a SAG award, Elba admits that he doesn’t have a systematic way of approaching roles. “It really depends on the director. The Dark Tower was very much an action led film so there was some physical training. For Ben in The Mountain Between Us, there was a lot of talking about the characters with Kate and me, but in Molly’s Game, I had to memorize every single word and punctuation that was written and I don’t like to memorize words. I am more of a guy that sort of feels it and says it.”
Baltimore Urban Spectrum — www.baltimoreurbanspectrum.com – January/February 2018
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A film based on the true story of Molly Bloom, an Olympic-class skier who ran the world’s most exclusive high-stakes poker game and became an FBI target, Elba plays her defense lawyer who discovers that there’s much more to Molly than the salacious tabloid stories reveal. “What attracted me to the role is that I play a lawyer that judges her and then decided to go against that and goes one step further and takes on the law system,” shares Elba. “Charlie is this very polished sort of seen-it-all hotshot lawyer, but I think he’s really intrigued by Molly because there is so much more complexity to her than how she initially presents. He thinks he has her figured out the minute she walks in the door and then she really challenges him with her intellect and the strength of her character and personality and I think that really draws him in.” The directorial debut of playwright and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network), poker drives the plot of this story, which follows an athlete who was in the qualifying trials for freestyle skiing when an accident sent her down a very different path of hosting illegal high-stakes poker games. She ends up getting raided by the FBI, and writing a book about the whole affair. “This isn’t a whistle blowing film,” Elba continues. “It’s actually about integrity and it’s about gender balance and it’s about power.” In the film, Sorkin brilliantly cuts between Molly’s rise to power in the backrooms of Los Angeles following her fall from grace as an Olympic skier and her meetings with her lawyer. It’s a neatly done rise-and-fall story as Molly’s brush with Hollywood royalty, sports stars and business titans give her a decade of glitzy and glamorous success, but she soon attracts the wrong kind of attention when she inadvertently engages members of the Russian mob. There’s money, power and sexism in this indelible story about a woman competing in an all-male world and it’s the kind of gritty tale Hollywood gravitates to. “Hollywood has a lot of hanging fruit for stories and there are so many different personality types in this industry. There is the glamour of course, but there is the real underbelly and the uglier side, which we are all seeing come up now in what is happening in Hollywood,” says Elba, who starred as Nelson Mandela in The Weinstein Company biopic Mandela: The Long Walk to Freedom, a performance which earned him a Golden Globe nomination. .